4 lines
814 B
Plaintext
4 lines
814 B
Plaintext
recursive acronym
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n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have been TINT ( TINT Is Not TECO ). The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ( EINE Is Not EMACS ) and ZWEI ( ZWEI Was EINE Initially ). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for GNU's Not Unix! and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to Cygnus, Your GNU Support (though Cygnus people say this is a backronym ). The GNU recursive acronym may have been patterned on XINU, XINU Is Not Unix a particularly nice example because it is a mirror image, a backronym, and a recursive acronym. See also mung , EMACS.
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